Twelve students in ENGL 260/SPAN 392 Multiculturalism in Al-Andalus are studying for three weeks in Spain during this Spring '13 extended study course.

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Madinat al-Zahra by Lindsay Bartolini ’14

On Friday we went to Madinat Al-Zahra! It was awesome, except for the part where I almost got lost. I am writing my paper on this site because I love history and archaeology. The artifacts found at Al-Zahra were gorgeous and were very well preserved. I was especially interested in seeing the storage room where they hold even more artifacts from the site that are not on display and instead are being worked on for analysis. The portion of the city that we saw was huge and it only made up 5% of the entire city that was actually there. The ruins of walls and even places where a door hing used to be on the floor was impressive. Then we saw the reconstruction of the arches that would make up part of one of the grand halls and also part of the entrance to the city. They were amazing to see even though I knew they were reconstructed. However most of them were reconstructed with the materials that had been used before and were exactly the way that they should be. The archaeologists wanted to give people a taste of what it would have looked like in its historical time because otherwise, it might just look like a pile of rubble.

It is obvious that archaeologists are still working in the area and that was very interesting to me and I was happy I got to see it. There was a portion that was restricted because archaeologists were working and I was really excited about that because that means that they could uncover new information about the site.